Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
Repost "Question"
voidmain:
Great, I think you will be happy. I've got the Athalon 1600 and Soyo Dragon motherboard w/512MB of RAM and that bugger just *screams*. I've got the Geforce II. Did a full RedHat 7.2 install and it detected everything, start to finish in about 10 minutes and 20 seconds and only one boot. Of course your install may go faster as I have an older slower hard drive in this box (upgraded everything but the HD, CD, and Monitor).
You should have plenty of RAM as long as you aren't going to do a lot of VMware stuff (256 is surely enough to do it but depending on how much RAM you want to give to your guest OS or how many virtual machines you want to run it could get into swap).
I have one problem with people making claims about Linux and not needing a lot of memory. Sure, Linux *can* run in a little amount of memory but for Desktop work I would never run it with less than 256MB. Linux isn't the fastest when you start swapping, especially on slower processors, but as long as you can feed it enough RAM it blows pretty much everything else away. Now for several server functions (dedicated DNS server, sendmail server, lightweight web server etc) 64MB or even 32MB is plenty because you don't need to run Xwindows or any graphical apps which is where the memory gets eaten.
Now I don't know how it will compare to Windows as far as how long it takes to boot but I personally think this is a stupid comparison anyway, mainly because I never turn any of my machines off (except for my laptop), and the BIOS checks take just as long as the actual Linux boot on my fast machine.
The only place I can see where bootup would really matter is on embedded devices (PDAs etc) and they don't boot up from from the beginning like a desktop version of the OS does anyhow, they have a ROM image and when turned on bring up a desktop immediately by loading a RAM image of the system in a running state from ROM. You don't monkey with the boot sequence on embedded devices so you can do this.
This is much the same as when you do a "suspend" on a laptop (or a suspend on a Virtual Machine in VMware) and the amount of time it takes to get the system back up to a fully running system at a desktop is directly related to the amount of time it takes to load the RAM and Video memory images from disk. May take 10 seconds on a desktop with a 512MB RAM image but on an embedded device with only 16MB of RAM and the image to be loaded is stored in ROM it is nearly instantaneous.
And speaking of never turning my machines off, I have had several machines with multi *year* uptimes without a shutdown or reboot. In fact my current main Apache/sendmail/pop/imap/DNS/more multifunction server has been running since I installed it, next week will be it's 1 year anniversary (uptime command shows 359 days right now). It was originally installed with RedHat 6.1 but I have continually upgraded everything and have never had to reboot it (haven't upgraded the kernel). It runs about 20 web sites and domains, is the mail server for around 50 people, is the network monitoring server and intrusion detection server (IDS) for the ISP where it resides and it has never been rebooted. In fact, two days ago I noticed it has a failed hard drive and this will get replaced without having to reboot the server as soon as I mail one over to the location where the machine resides (running hardware RAID 5 with 5 drives).
In case you haven't noticed, I am a satisfied Linux user.....
[ January 26, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
Centurian:
Hey VoidMain,
Thanks, the more I learn about Linux the more I wish I had started using it about 12 years ago rather than dos.
Regarding reboots I reboot both computers here at least once a day when running Windows. With Mandrake on the 600 it ran slow but very stable. Did not have to reboot it at all when running Mandrake.
Hopefully I will be a satisfied Linux user now with the new comp.
Later
Centurian
voidmain:
Let me know how it goes, and I will certainly be glad to help if you have any questions. Now for a riddle:
Why doesn't Windows have an "uptime" command?
[ January 26, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
Centurian:
Hey VoidMain,
Thanks
Microsoft's response to your riddle is "What's Uptime" LOL
Later
Centurian
[ January 27, 2002: Message edited by: Centurian ]
jtpenrod:
"I have one problem with people making claims about Linux and not needing a lot of memory.
Sure, Linux *can* run in a little amount of memory but for Desktop work I would never run it
with less than 256MB."
I did. I installed Mandrake on a Dell OptiPlex GXa with 32MB of RAM, even though Mandrake said it requires at least 64MB. I used the KDE desktop with no problems. Sure, I couldn't open all the desktops and fill them with apps - start one too many and memory would run out, causing that last app to close. However, this was at worst a minor inconvenience as the system itself wouldn't crash. My only real problem was in using Konqueror. Now *that* would really slow up and swap so much the HD sounded as though it was grinding a pound of coffee. Netscape, OTOH, presented no problems whatsoever.
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